Road Trip! Photos From US Route 30 in 1948

As summer approaches and the urge to hit the highways -- and the byways, and the back roads -- begins to take hold, LIFE offers a series of pictures from Nebraska and Wyoming made seven long decades ago.

In the summer of 1948, LIFE photographer Allan Grant set out on a trip from Omaha, Neb., toward Salt Lake City, Utah, traveling west through Nebraska and Wyoming along one of the most storied stretches in America: Route 30, part of the early transcontinental Lincoln Highway.

For reasons lost to time, none of Grant’s marvelous photos from that epic post-war road trip were ever published in LIFE. Here, as summer approaches and the urge to hit the highways — and the byways, and the back roads — begins to take hold, LIFE offers a whole series of Grant’s pictures from Nebraska and Wyoming made seven long decades ago, in tribute to the innate human desire to get up and go.